“Imaginative music with a sometimes picturesque quality, inhabited by capricious characters who sneak across the staves. [...] Spee emerges as an Edgar Allen Poe-like storyteller with a lot of feel for emotional undercurrents.”
-NRC






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COMPOSITIONS

After graduating from the Conservatory of Amsterdam as a classical pianist, specialised in contemporary repertoire, Mattias Spee started composing his own music. In his compositions he blends his widely ranging musical interests, which include classical music, jazz, minimal music, world music and pop. The compositions are not always 100% set in stone, Mattias often leaves space for improvisation and spur of the moment ideas.


Videos of original compositions

Video Credits: Conservatorium van Amsterdam / Keep an Eye Foundation / VPRO Vrije Geluiden / Naarden International Piano Festival





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TOETSENPARADE

The Toetsenparade (Keyboard Parade) is a festival for the keyboard instruments of all shapes and sizes. For the edition that took place in the weekend of 22/23/24 March of 2024, Mattias Spee was invited as artist in residence. As such, he curated a program full of artists who are each inventing and reinventing keyboard instruments in their own way.


Pictures from Toetsenparade 2024

Photo Credits: Igor Iofe / Anne Veinberg


The festival opener was the Rembrandt Frerichs Trio, an ensemble which comes from the jazz scene and now applies their vocabulary on historiscal instruments. Guy Maori played 19th and 20th century music on the anachronistic harpsichord. The Xavi Torres Trio presented the project Kind of Beethoven, in which they reinvent Beethoven sonatas in a modern style with lots of jazz-influences. Xico Ribas Tur played original compositions, using live electronics to enrich the sound of the piano. Arieh Chrem a.k.a. Cartopol released his new EP Storm Service at the Toetsenparade. Arieh is an electronic music producer and uses a very modern keyboard instrument, the keyboard of his laptop. However, there was an even more novel instrument at the festival. Marije Baalman of the Instrument Inventors Initiative presented her newly designed Twiddler, which she uses for high-speed live coding. Marije and Toetsenparade founder Jan van der Sangen together gave a lecture on instrument building, a process to which each has their own wildly different approach. Of course, artist in residence Mattias Spee performed himself, as well as leading a workshop with renowned piano tuner Charles Rademaker. Together with the audience, they dove into the mechanics of the piano and demonstrated how a pianist and piano tuner collaborate. It was a highly varied an innovative festival program at the Toetsenparade, hosted by Het Veem in Amsterdam.






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LORIA

After having mainly composed for solo piano, Mattias Spee started branching out and wrote a piece for a larger ensemble consisting of piano and strings. In his new composition Loria, Mattias looks for the boundary between egalitarian chamber music and a hierarchical division between soloist and accompaniment.


Pictures from the premiere of Loria

Photo Credits: Susanne van der Kleij


For the premiere, which took place on the 19th of November 2023, Mattias collaborated with the Nova Sonantia Ensemble, a collective of string players who are ambassadors of new music.






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INSOMNIA

During the 2023/2024 season, Mattias Spee toured all major concert venues in The Netherlands as part of his nomination for the Dutch Classical Talent Award. The main component of the tour program was a selection of his own compositions, combined in a 9-part cycle entitled Insomnia. Mattias paired his own music and poetry with several nocturnes, some written by famous composers like Frederic Chopin, Alexander Scriabin and Francis Poulenc, others newly commissioned from young talented composers Gijs Idema and Lisa Weyrauther. Both Gijs and Lisa are bridging the gap between jazz and classical music, something they have in common with Mattias, which is why their collaboration was so fruitful. The last concert of the tour took place on 19 October 2023 in TivoliVredenburg and was  broadcast by the Concertzender.

Pictures from Insomnia at TivoliVredenburg

Photo Credits: Maarten Mooijman

SONG DUO

Mattias Spee is not the only musician who has a knack for music by composers who don’t get the credit they deserve. He has teamed up with countertenor Arturo den Hartog and together they perform songs by composers who are unlikely to be heard anywhere else. Their selection of repertoire includes songs by female and/or black composers, music from Arturo’s home country Suriname and African-American spirituals.


Pictures from Keti Koti 2023

Photo Credits: Foppe Schut


As a duo, Mattias and Arturo have played at prestigious events, such as the O.Festival in Rotterdam, National Composers Day at the New Music NOW Express, as well as celebrations of national holidays at the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, like Keti Koti and National Liberation Day.






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MUSEUMNACHT 2023

For the 2023 edition of the Museumnacht (Museum Night), a yearly event during which all museum in Amsterdam open their doors until 2.00 AM, Mattias Spee was asked to curate the program for the Pianola Museum. This small museum for self-playing instruments was very familiar to Mattias. During his time at the Conservatory of Amsterdam, it was a stone’s throw away from his house in the Jordaan and as a member of the Piano Student Council, Mattias helped save the Pianola Museum from bankruptcy by organising student excursions to the museum and spreading a petition which ultimately led to the municipality keeping the museum open.


Pictures from Museumnacht 2023

Photo Credits: David Hup


For the Museumnacht 2023, Mattias curated a program centered around the pianist/composer. For the longest time it was only natural to both play and compose music for an instrument. However, in the past few decades, note-writers and note-players have been specializing more and more in their specific fields. Now there is a new surge of pianist/composers knocking on the doors of the Dutch music scene. Apollon Kalamenios, Elena Pisano and Aleksandra Tonelli joined Mattias Spee for a relay-concert that lasted all night. They each paired their own music with a pianola roll of a pianist/composer that has inspired them. Showcases of the museum’s self-playing pianos included performances by Béla Bartok, Roberto Firpo, Claude Debussy and Duke Ellinton. The old and the new, united in an evening chock-full of music.






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SHADES OF LIFE

Mattias Spee worked together with composer Titus Tielens on an album of new piano compositions entitled Shades of Life. The recordings took place in the Protestant Church of Uitwijk. During the day, there is a lot of noise from the farmers working on the land, but after nightfall it’s dead silent. The intimacy of the nightly collaboration of Mattias and Titus with recording engineer Erik de Goederen comes across on the resulting album. Mattias was afforded the freedom to improvise on the material, which made every take a little different. Titus established his own record label Kinyobi Music in order to release Shades of Life. The album release took place on the 6th of November 2022 at BIJ ANDREAS in Naarden.

Shades of Life

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“Solid, accessible music, which sounds good mainly due to the magnificent playing of the young pianist Mattias Spee.”
-Nederlands Dagblad






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RIVER

Mattias Spee usually composes by himself, but his collaboration with Bea Álvarez Borque, who specialises in live electronics, is a notable exception. Together they made the piece River, which illustrates the journey of a river from glacier to ocean. For this project, Mattias and Bea used their respective acoustic instruments, piano and viola, as well as several electronic elements, such as synthesizers, samplers and live effects. After a 5-day residentie at Akoesticum Ede in October of 2022, organised by Windows of Opportunity, they premiered this piece at the Muziekhuis Utrecht.

Premiere of River at Muziekhuis Utrecht


Video Credits: Windows of Opportunity





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TIJDCAPSULES

What links us to our past and our future? That question was central to the project entitled Tijdcapsules (Time Capsules), which premiered at the Grachtenfestival 2022. A team consisting of Arjan Linker on trombone, Mattias Spee on piano and synthesizer, Benjamin de Boer on double bass, Gijs Idema on guitar and Dimitri Geelhoed on electronics set out to answer this question. In the resulting show they combined elements from Indian raga, Georgian folk music, Renaissance polyphony and pop music from bands like Radiohead into a dream-like hour of music, supported by live visual effects from Lisa Derksen Castillo a.k.a. Sea the Sound.


Videos of Tijdcapsules at Grachtenfestival 2022

Video Credits: Lommer


By combining music from different places on earth and different moments in history, on the one hand it becomes apparent how fast the world changes, while on the other hand it will always stay the same. This group of musicians has something specific in common: besides composers and performers, they are all avid improvisers. That’s a big part of why this team was selected for this project. Improvisation is the closest we can get to actually capturing a point in time that is truly unique, because by its very nature we can’t hold on to it.






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DANSEN MET DE DOOD

In collaboration with writer/director Tabula Raas and voice actor Céline Vermeulen, Mattias Spee made a radio play entitled Dansen met de Dood (Dancing with Death). This musical piece of theatre -or this theatrical piece of music- was inspired by William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth and deals with the temptation of suicide and being released from suffering.


Dansen met de Dood

Sound Credits: Wim Selles





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GOUDSBLOEM TRIO

From 2016 to 2020, Mattias Spee formed an ensemble with clarinetist Ana Prazeres and cellist Hadewych van Gent. The three met as fellow students of the Conservatory of Amsterdam and proceeded to play together during some of the most formative years of their young careers. They named their ensemble after their rehearsal space, which was Mattias’s home in the student housing facility at the Goudsbloemstraat in Amsterdam.


Beethoven: Clarinet Trio, opus 11 at Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ


Video Credits: Kees Vos


After playing the “standard repertoire”, consisting of pieces by composers like Johannes Brahms and Gabriel Fauré, the trio explored some lesser-known music for this particular combination of instruments. Examples of this are the Fantasy Trio by American composer Robert Muczynski and the Clarinet Trio by Nino Rota, who was a prolific film composer, but unbeknownst to many, has written a lot of wonderful stand-alone music as well. After some succesful years as an ensemble, the Goudsbloem Trio stopped playing together when each of the members started to have more and more other engagements, but they remain close friends to this day.